Frequently, when a person receives a call, he/she does not know the urgency of the call and/or the desired topic of conversation. A problem occurs when the person is otherwise preoccupied with another task, such as on another call, in a meeting, or the like. Even with caller ID information being displayed to the person, he/she may not have sufficient information to know whether to break away from the task to answer the call or to allow voicemail to handle the call. For example, the calling individual may simply prefer to chat with the person on the phone, rather than via email or text messaging, but does not want to interrupt the person if he/she is otherwise preoccupied.
Some approaches have been proposed to address this situation. In one approach, an end user can input a message followed by a destination number into his/her phone. The message and destination number are then sent to a central office, which can attach the message to the caller ID or caller ID-call waiting information to be transmitted to the phone corresponding to the destination number. In another approach, messages of a pre-specified length and/or having a pre-specified prefix can be processed. In still another approach, a code can be entered to enable the insertion of corresponding text into the caller ID information. In a previous approach, ancillary information can be communicated along with initiating a call using a separate channel, such as an Internet Protocol (IP) communications channel or as a text message using the short message service (SMS) protocol.